Objective
We’re developing a PHP console app that will be a running as a daemon using the PEAR System_Daemon class. The script is ideally a timed loop, that executes indefinitely until terminated.
What this loop does is query a database of players of our FB game on timed intervals, and then make posts using certain criteria to their Facebook walls/timelines.
Our app will be hosted on our Facebook page, which will also contain some albums, photos and videos that we are using to feature on these posts.
Posting on Walls/Timelines
My question is, whether we would be able to use the Facebook PHP SDK to, from within our console application, running as a service, share these albums from our console app, as posts on the users timeline, without having need for confirmation from the FB user in any way, providing we have acquired the appropriate extended permissions of course.
Appearance Sharing vs Uploading
Will the appearance for sharing an album, or video appear the same, on the users timeline as if they posted it themselves, or will the post simply appear as a thumbnail with text next to it.
I’ve noticed that Facebook nowadays posts photos in a neat collage with more than one thumbnail, and this is the effect that we want to achieve. Also, if not mistaken, I believe that videos added to your wall post also shows inline, as a nice large video, instead as a thumbnail.
Would we rather have to upload these images to a Facebook users account, and if so, is it possible to create new Albums on a users FB account, using the PHP SDK, and the required extended permissions granted? Or can we achieve the same look and feel by simply sharing?
Hosting media externally
Can we add photo’s to users profiles, hosted externally perhaps, that will allow the PHP script to post them to an album on their account without needing to upload?
We are trying to avoid uploads, as this will have a performance impact on the server side application.
Providing you request the correct permissions, you can upload photos to the user’s account using the Graph API quite easily. To post multiple photos you will have to make multiple API calls. If you post to the wall, the photos will be added to the “Wall Photos” album.
The Graph API does allow you to create albums on the user’s behalf, and lets you upload photos straight to the album too. This will create photo stories on the wall like the image you posted in your question.
What you can do, however, is host the files externally. Facebook will always load the images from their server so you have to upload them to facebook. If you want to host the photos externally, you must post the images to the user’s wall / timeline as links, but these won’t appear under the user’s Photos or under Albums.
Hope this answers all your questions. Documentation for uploading photos and creating albums can be found on the Facebook developer website.